


Untitled

by Dreadmartha



Category: Mobsterswitch - Fandom, Problem Sleuth (Webcomic)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-21
Updated: 2011-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-26 10:00:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/281706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreadmartha/pseuds/Dreadmartha





	Untitled

It was one of the rare times you had gotten the Felt to work alongside your Company in the interest of bringing in one of the Scoundrels.  
You got a tip that you still, even as reports come in that the mission was successful and all injuries sustained very minor, don’t feel comfortable with. It came at three in the morning to your headquarters, a call that you barely picked up in time. You had been working late on an unrelated case, the only Company man there at the time. The fact that the caller knew you would be there was what started your weariness.  
It was just a voice, male though the caller was using some kind of voice modifier. It sounded so robotic that you almost didn’t understand. But you did make it out, after a moment.  
The voice gave an address; thirty-four hundred Monroe Street, apartment two hundred and six.  
You knew, after you’d written the address down and poured some coffee into yourself, that thirty-four hundred Monroe Street was going to be a sad little tenement that had been built cheaply and quickly for the cities dirtiest immigrants a hundred years ago. And it had only gotten worse as the years passed.  
The address matched with the information you and, as you later found out, the Felt had amassed about the probable residence of the weakest link in the Twilight Scoundrels. Pernicious Innovator.  
You went to the Felt later that day, around seven in the morning, and asked them what they knew about the place. Mixing with these green idiots has never been your preference, but if the address proved useful, it would be better to go in with a search warrant, not break in the way you and the Company usually do.  
And, if the place was booby trapped, it would be nice to send other people in to find that out before you did.  
It became an official Felt raid on the building. One that you told Scout and Brawler to tag along on.  
That was another plus to working with the Felt, you got to give orders via radio from the station, rather than whisper them quickly before taking action and then having the shout them again at Scout.  
It was amazingly easy, incredibly streamline. Not, you know, because the Felt were involved. They’re known for performing messily and being poorly organized. Your own men are known for taking justice into their own hands, but despite these hang-ups the raid was a rousing success.  
They hauled the Innovator in and put him away in a locked room with a two-way mirror and not much else.  
What’s more, they cleaned out the apartment and spent hours and hours bringing boxes of papers and books, parts of machines, doodads, gewgaws, you name it, back to the station.  
Your name is Deadeye Detective and your face hurts because the sight of all those papers, all that technology, all the information on the Twilight Scoundrels, has had you almost smiling for some time now.  
Innovator has been in the room for three hours now, by himself. The door is guarded and you’ve kept watch on him via the mirror. He does nothing but fidget and murmur, fiddle with the edge of the table, glance suddenly at the door if someone passes it too loudly in the hall. You think that perhaps he doesn’t know about the two-way mirror, being as he’s given it no kind of interest.  
That would match up with what you know about him. Despite being the mastermind behind several murders, numerous heist, and more attempts that fell through for no fault of his own, he has never been brought in before. He has no concept of the finer workings of police policy. You would hazard to guess that is why it’s taking so long for someone to go in and talk to him; they need the right someone to go in. Someone who can explain it to him in terms he’d understand. Someone who can put the fear of god into him.  
You finish that thought as Crowbar comes up beside you and looks in on him.  
“Finally got him in there.”  
You hum in agreement.  
“Have you found someone to talk to him yet?”  
Crowbar’s jaw works around under his skin and you get a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach.  
“C’mon, there’s something you better see.”  
You flag down Brawler, who’s just back from picking up lunch for himself, Demoman and Scout, and tell him to wait at the mirror until you come back. He does so, grumbling.  
Crowbar leads you into stacks of boxes of evidence, a maze that’s been built around his desk. He reaches into one of the boxes and starts pulling out fat, dusty folders. The things hit the desk with heavy thuds and cause tiny explosions of dust on impact. Crowbar pulls out three, but from what you can see there are many more in the box, all identical. He opens one, pulls out a smaller folder that looks like it’s full of photographs.  
He hands it to you, his gaunt face drew and wrinkled around the mouth. He doesn’t look you in the eye. You open the folder.  
\---

Pernicious Innovator watches you very carefully as the door snaps closed behind you and you come around to sit across the long metal table from him. Given his record, he’s been handcuffed to one of the table legs. His free hand twitches nervously, grabbing at the air where its partner would be. He looks down, as if to try and find his missing hand, then remembers the handcuff.  
You slide the ashtray from the far side of the table to a more practical spot easily within your reach. His eyes dart to the circle of metal and then up to your face, then down to the pocket where your pipe pushes against the fabric of your vest, then back down to the table and his hand.  
It’s cold in the room, and you consider the fact that this is the first time you’ve seen the Innovator without his heavy coat and layers upon layers of clothing. He’s got a wrinkled white shirt on with many of the buttons in the wrong holes, slacks, thick rubber boots, the kind one wears to rake leaves or mow lawns around heavy rain.  
He’s shivering, has been shivering for the past few hours. You can see he’s broken out in a cold sweat, beads of moisture dotting his big forehead. Without the coat and the threat of unleashing some unknown mechanical horror on you and the people you care about, he is a tiny, gawky weakling.  
You pulled out your pipe, your tobacco box, matches. He watches silently as you fill the bowl with leaves and then slip the box back into your breast pocket. You strike a match and start the leaves burning. You puff slowly, pushing aside all your personal questions in favor of finding the words to introduce him to his current position.  
“You’re a long way from home.”  
He squeaks, eyes darting around before he scoots back in his chair and pull his legs up to chest, folding his arm around them and pressing his painfully crooked nose into the strait between his knees. His lip has bled and started swelling, his left eye doesn’t open as much as the right, the dark skin looking tender. You think about what it would be like to reach across the table and flinch him there, watch him jolt back in pain and yelp.  
“But you already knew that.” You gesture with your pipe to his limp arm and its hand in the cuff. He looks at the hand, his eyes hardening then getting soft. Rage, shame. You puff on your pipe again, giving him a signal that he can talk.  
He raises his face from where it pressed against his knees, his glass jaw now sitting on his kneecaps.  
“Why are you here, Detective?” It’s the most fluently you’ve ever heard him speak. He’s been thinking about this, about seeing Brawler and Scout, maybe he heard your orders come through on the radio.  
“I help local law enforcement when it happens to be mutually beneficial. Do you know why you’re here?”  
He blinks slowly, breathes in as if he’s about to speak, then breathes out. He starts again.  
“Thirty-two counts of possession of illegal or unlicensed weaponry, nine counts of armed burglary, three counts of armed robbery, six counts of conspiracy to rob, seven counts of murder.”  
“Eight.”  
He looks you in the face, his thin brows reaching across his battered nose for each other.  
“I only—no, no, that—it wasn’t me. It, it must have been Dddelinquent,” he shivers suddenly, grips his legs tighter.  
“You all work as a team, don’t you? All for one and a record for all.”  
He hides behind his knees again.  
“If you serve all of your sentences concurrently, you’ll die of old age in the Metropolis Center Penitentiary. You have a rare opportunity to ease that sentence.” He already knows what you want. “If you cooperate and tell us everything you know about the remaining members of your little gang, we’ll see you’re moved to a different facility and given a chance at parole.”  
He looks at the table for a long time, then up at you as you carefully tamp down ash.  
“You really,” his eyes jump away as you look at him, he swallows dryly. “You really shouldn’t smoke Detective.”  
A sudden rush of adrenaline makes you want to grab him and lay him out of the table, see if he’ll pay more attention to the points your fists raise.  
You keep it together.  
“I’ll keep that in mind.”  
A bead of sweat slides down the side of his face, he shudders when it gets to his cheekbone and wipes it away with his wrist.  
He’ll talk, you already know. But your gut twists inside you and makes it impossible to focus on getting him talking.  
“Are you warm enough?”  
Without all his gizmos and traps and gambits to make him dangerous, you can see just how deeply ridicule cuts him. And the fact that it’s coming from you seems to make it worse. He struggles to answer, trying to be polite and delicate with his reply. A man like him is always desperate to avoid trouble, despite how much they end up causing. And he’s well aware that you, not the Company but you personally, are the only thing between him and the Felt. And the Felt are more than just regular trouble.  
“Ah-actually,” his hand scrunches up the fabric of his pant leg. His whole body is shaking with the effort to keep warm and not stammer. Innovator, compared to the rest of society, falls short where speaking with anything like confidence is concerned. He’s spent his whole life knowing people can’t stand listening to him, he’ll be lucky if he ever manages to face that. But for right now, he’s focused on keeping you happy.  
He hums, trying to think of what to say and how to make himself say it.  
It’s a truly pathetic sight.  
“Nnno, I’m fine.”  
Your gut loosens up seeing him give up so easily. Your head hurts as your brain broadcasts the shame of twisting a knife to the rest of the body. You drop your gaze and dump the ashes left in your pipe. Shame, guilt, regret, remorse, all these and more don’t mix well with you.  
They make you remember things like having been awake for the past forty-eight hours, drinking nothing but coffee and eating…  
When was the last time you ate something?  
Innovator is glassy eyed, curled up in his chair with one arm hanging from his shoulder and stretching over to the leg of the table. Deadweight. He’s slipping back into his head, hiding from the cold and the cops and you.  
You get up from the table, go to the door.  
“Dddetective?” He almost squeaks. He looks up at you and starts to shake again.  
“Yes?”  
“Are you, that is, can I ah-ask if, will they be, uhm,” he starts biting his fingernail, his other hand jerking on the chain of the handcuff. His head snaps around to look at it, a long, stuttering ‘uhhhhm,’ escaping him.  
“What is it, Innovator?”  
His head jerks back to you.  
“Are you coming back?”  
His eyes are watery and big, even the tenderized left one. Dilated pupils, pulling in light to help ease the strain of having to exist. He’s got the eyes of an old, beaten dog.  
At this point nobody will even consider coming in here. You’ll bet Crowbar called a meeting and said that you had agreed to handle the interrogation alone. The lazy prick.  
Singular responsibility does suit you, however. Not having a partner who needs everything explained to them so they can charge in and mess everything up will be a great help. And handling the interrogation puts you in good stead with the Felt and gives you a reason to steal the credit for everything you’re going to get out of Innovator.  
Of course, he doesn’t know that.  
“That depends on what Captain Crowbar decides.”  
“Oh, oh yes of course.” He’s devastated. His nose sinks between his knees again, his eyes fixed on the ashtray.  
“Always a pleasure talking to you, Innovator.”  
The door snaps closed behind you.  
\---

“Anemia.”  
You left Innovator thinking that you would grab a bite to eat and be back to get his story in half an hour. Unfortunately for that plan, a meal of cold Chinese food left you feeling charitable. So you went to Crowbar, asking that he let you go back in with a coat in addition to a secretary and her typewriter.  
And, of course, the Captain chose that moment to ask for your reasons.  
“He’ll pass out before we can get anything out of him if we keep freezing him.”  
It’s a gamble, but a safe one. Crowbar is the brains here, and you doubt he knows anything about medicine. Not his department, not his problem.  
What he doesn’t know about anemia could fill this station three times over.  
Clovers shifts his weight from foot to foot, heel to toe.  
“It’s too dangerous, he could have anything in there.”  
Crowbar looks at you, taking your exasperated expression into account.  
“I’m not suggesting we give him his coat, I said we need to give him a coat. He’s no good to us if he freezes before we can take down what he has to say.”  
Clovers has no counter to that.  
“So what coat are we going to give him?” Crowbar’s fake concern grates against your MSG-fueled nerves.  
If the rest of the Company were still around, you might have asked Brawler for his coat. But you sent them back to headquarters a while ago. You sigh. Innovator is considerably thinner than you, though he has a clean three inches on you.  
You doubt he will mind if the sleeves are too short. Nothing you’ve ever seen him wear has been his size, anyway.  
You, the coat and the key to his handcuffs go in first.  
He’s still curled up, his head resting on his knees. You hear low, rhythmic breathing. Asleep, smart man.  
You shake him by the shoulder. He starts, gasping and looking around wildly. It takes him a minute to realize where he is. His eyes are bloodshot as they turn to you, with your coat folded over your arm.  
“Hello,” he manages. He swallows, his voice raspy, his throat dry. He looks at your coat. “You’re going? Already?”  
It’s close to midnight. Not that he would know that.  
“No, stand up please.”  
He unfolds himself, standing as much as the handcuffs will let him. He has to lean to one side, meaning the two of you are eye level for once. You open your coat behind him, help his tired arm and shoulder into the sleeve. He watches you, his hand closing around the collar and holding the garment up while you pull his chair closer to the table leg that’s been getting to know his other hand for the past eight hours. You hold his wrist tight, unlocking the half of the cuff encircling the leg.  
His breathing is more labored now as you put the key back in your pocket and pull his arm into the other sleeve.  
“Am, am I g-going?”  
“No,” you lock the open cuff back around the table leg again. “You can sit down.”  
He follows orders, pulling his legs up to his chest and pulling your coat around himself. Thankfully, he doesn’t try to button it up.  
Then the secretary joins you, as does her extremely vocal typewriter and chain smoking. Innovator is irked by her presence, more so than you predicted. He says very little, however. He hunches in your coat, pulling it tight with one hand and waits for her to load in a crisp white page. You take out your own notebook and pen.  
You start with the basics; legal names, dates of birth, known family, addresses, contacts, former employers, girlfriends. He answers all of your questions as simply as he can, and even then the secretary hums and haws as she scratches out lines. Your notebook fills up, though you have to go back and cross out whole lines of shorthand as he talks and remembers more.  
You move on to his history with the Scoundrels. He says he was the last to enter the team, that Peccant Scofflaw and Angry Delinquent already had records before you joined forces. You ask him what kinds of records and he tells you in detail. Innovator has an encyclopedic knowledge of crimes, though the lists come much easier to his mouth when they directly concern him.  
You write and interview for hours. Often you have to remind him of questions, compare his answer to one question with answers previously given. He sweats and pauses, trying and failing time and again to master his stammer. He pulls at his hair, chews his fingernails, scratches his face. Every now and then he stops and has you go back over what he’s told you. He makes amendments, addendums, adds prologues and epilogues, tries to recall exact wording, fluctuations in voices.  
Normally you would tell him to get to the point, but Innovator doesn’t work that way. There’s a part of him that needs this to all be in a precise detail as he can manage. That mystery reason of his reminds you that you still aren’t sure about your early morning tip off.  
You continue until he finishes outlining a plan they had set in motion two weeks ago.  
“Oh, you know what happened, Detective, you were there to stop it.”  
You nod, dumping the ashes from your pipe. The room is choked with smoke. It’s a wonder he hasn’t suffocated. Perhaps he isn’t quite that weak.  
“You are willing to swear in a court of law that these statements,” ‘these statements’ could not be held in your new notebook alone. You started barrowing blank sheets from the secretary, and she has barely any left. “are true and that you have not lied or put forth unreal information in any part of your testimony?”  
“Ah, well, the, the parts where I talk, the dialogue, some of that, it’s not… all true exactly.”  
“You mentioned that, I have them all noted.”  
“So do I,” the secretary rasps. She piling the pages together, flexing her fingers and rubbing them.  
“Then, good, yes.”  
“Very good.” You collect your papers, feeling how far away the last time you slept is.  
He is silent while you help carry the typewriter out, leaving him alone again for how long he has no idea. You watch him for a while, your brain ticking away loudly in your skull. The Felt have his testimony, have him, and the manpower to ensure that they keep him. He will face a court and be put away for the rest of his life. Every parole board he appears in front of will turn him down. He is finally caught.  
And still, your head throbs, there’s so many things you need to do.  
You go back to Crowbars desk. It’s four in the morning, so you need a flashlight to navigate the stacks of boxes. Finally, after scraping your ankles and kneeing several boxes, you find the desk. It’s clear of everything but a mug full of pens and the dust from that morning. You turn to the box with the folders, heft it up from its position on top of a stack and go back to the room. Before entering you watch him again in the mirror. He looks exactly how he did when he was first brought in. You would like to believe that your coat adds a layer of polish to his ruin of a form, but there’s no lying to yourself at four in the morning.  
You finagle to door open, hear it snap behind you. He looks up, tired and trapped and cold. In the bulk of your coat he can politely hide his shivering, but his bloodless face and the low chatter of his teeth fill you in.  
You put the box down on the metal table, dust yourself off.  
“This, isn’t this your coat, Detective?”  
“It is.” You make sure your sleeves are rolled up and dig through the box for the folder Crowbar presented you with that morning.  
“Thank you.”  
You find it, your jaws tightening. It is a standard sized manila folder full of photographs. None of them are sticking out to reveal what’s inside anymore. In looking through the folder earlier you could not help organizing them.  
You place it in front of Innovator and stand over him. He looks from the box, to the folder, then up at you.  
“Open it.”  
His hand shakes as he does so. The murmur of him pulling it open crashes around the room. He barely looks, before squeaking and closing it again. His hand goes straight to his mouth and you can plainly see him shaking again.  
You slide the folder back in front of you, flip it open and spread the photos out over the table.  
They’re all of you. Every single photograph is of you, in some way shape or form. There are prints of pictures you recall taking, an odd few are actual photographs that had been thought lost. Largely, though, they are photographs of you, your apartment, your headquarters, where you go food shopping, where you go for lunch, everything, taken without your knowledge by a variety of different cameras. Some are black and white, some full color. They range from amateurish to quite artistic and well executed.  
Innovator rakes his bitten up nails across his forehead, down his cheek, his eyes closed tight. He’s struggling to breathe, making all sorts of tiny noises that might have some relation to words.  
You give him some time.  
“Ddddetective,” he struggles a hand going to his throat, “Ahhh, I am, I am s-s-s-so sssorry.”  
“To be quite honest, Innovator,” you reach into the box and pull out two big folders at random. You spread their contents out over the table as well, “I don’t believe you.”  
The folders, the bigger ones, contain copies and print outs and even originals of every scrap of paper that has touched you in about eight years. Everything from your Social Security Number to an invitation to the birthday of a friend of a friend to the library card you lost three years ago is either one the table or in the box.  
He fiddles with the handcuffs, focusing all of his attention on anything that’s not the table or you. The little noises start again as he tries to speak.  
“Nnnnnah, no one wa-was supposed to, to know,” He’s breaking down as he speaks. Innovator is the only one of the Scoundrels who can’t use shadow magic. That’s why he’s made a name for himself as an inventor. But, even with all his traps and gadgets, the others could easily overpower him. That’s the story of his whole life, being overpowered.  
Your anger at finding his files on you is only a taste of what he feels almost constantly. Your privacy was breached, yes, and in such a way that you had no way to know there was a problem in the first place. And that doesn’t hold a candle to what he’s been through.  
You almost feel sorry for him.  
“No one but you, Angry Delinquent and Peccant Scofflaw.”  
He shakes his head back and forth, rubbing the corner of his eye with his wrist. If there’s any moisture he’s trying to hide, you don’t see it.  
“Nnno one at all,” his voice shakes harder than the rest of him, which is quite a feat.  
“You expect me to believe that?”  
He shakes his head again, sniffling. Your gut tells you you’re being cruel, you ignore it.  
“Why haven’t you used any of this?”  
His brows knit, the lines around his mouth multiply and deepen. His eyes slide along the ground, then up your leg, hip, belly, chest, finally stopping just short of your nose. He swallows slowly, loudly, then manages to speak.  
“What?”  
“You’re not stupid, Innovator, you should know you can’t lie to me.”  
“I, it’s not, I haven’t.”  
“You just keep all this around for decoration.”  
“No,” he turns away, pulling on his ear.  
“Then what is all this for?”  
He hums, pulling his hair.  
“Nothing.”  
You grip the back of his chair and lean forward. He shrinks, wrinkling the fabric of your coat between his fingers.  
“Innovator, this is not nothing.” You try but you can’t keep all of your anger out of your voice. He starts as if you’d bit him. You move back a little, leave him enough room to breathe.  
He tugs at his lip, winces when he ends up pulling on the part that’s split. His brows move ever closer to each other, his frown widening.  
“Y-you are ja-just,” he breathes in and out quickly, “you’re so good at it.” He hums more nervously. “You make it look so, easy.”  
“Make what look easy?”  
He looks you in the eye for the first time ever.  
“Life.” He fiddles with one of the photos, looking down at it. “You get everything perfect from the start.”  
You would assure him that that is completely untrue, but you’re too gratified to know that the energy you put into seeming perfect is paying off.  
“I just,” he sighs through his nose, looking at the photo. It contains you on the street not far from headquarters, no one else, black and white. One of the better pictures he’s snapped. “it’s, it’s the best thing about you.” He almost sighs, his frown softening. “That’s why I just couldn’t do it.”  
“Couldn’t do what?”  
He looks at you again, surprised to see you.  
“Oh, th-that, uhm, two weeks ago, you recall.”  
“No, I don’t.”  
“Detective, please, you were right there.”  
“Refresh my memory.”  
He huffs. Tiredness must be making him bold, the way it made you brusque.  
“Two weeks ago, in the warehouse, before you, when you had just restrained Delinquent.” You do recall; Brawler had been given a run for his money, until Scout knocked Delinquent over the head from behind. “I had a clear shot at you, I suppose you didn’t see me.” You replay the scene in your head. Delinquent was down, as was Demoman, your gun was pointed directly at Scofflaw’s chest, Scout pulling out his gun to back you up. You had all forgotten about Innovator. “Scofflaw expected, he um, wanted me to fire, but” his shoulders rise, “I would have missed again anyway.”  
You remember that he did fire, but only after Scofflaw shouted at him. By then you had time to turn and dodge, giving Scofflaw a straight shot at the door. He took it, Scout hot on his heels, firing blindly as he ran. Innovator bolted, his legs puling the rest of him out the warehouse doors. Delinquent gave Brawler another hit on the jaw, then ran as fast as his tiny legs could. Delinquent you followed, your Thompson spitting fire and lead into darkness until you caught his shadow in the light of your firing and aimed for the legs. He screamed, forced himself to keep running.  
Unfortunately, magic won out over firepower and he escaped.  
You returned to headquarters, Scout turning up an hour later with several teeth loose and a fistful of Scofflaw’s hair.  
Rethinking the situation, you know that Innovator would not have missed, had he fired when it was expected of him.  
“I thought he, maybe that he hadn’t noticed. He got suspicious, he started reminding me of all the, just, what I had done, over the years. I was scared.” He fusses with the photograph. “So I called you.”  
You straighten up. He called you.  
“Last night?”  
He nods.  
“Why didn’t you just turn yourself in?”  
“I, it wasn’t, I didn’t think that you,” his cheeks start to encroach on his eyes, “would go to the police.”  
You can’t help but feel bad for him now, imagining that you wanted anything but to lock him up. You keep your mouth shut, trying to think of a polite maneuver to avoid the awkward position he’s put you in.  
There’s a knock on the door, then Crowbar sticks his head in.  
“They’re here for him.”  
You look at your watch. It’s six thirty in the morning.  
“Alright.”  
You start putting your personal information away. Innovator watches silently. There’s another knock and he looks up at you.  
“If you have time, Detective, do you think you could, could, uhm, visit?”  
The door opens and the biggest government goons you’ve ever seen enter. They unlock him and are about to handcuff him again, this time behind his back, when you remember your coat.  
“Oh, yes, I forgot,”  
They muscle him out of it and hand it over to you. As they head for the door, you make yourself speak.  
“Innovator.” You have his full attention and the ire of the goons for making them pause again. “I’ll check my schedule.”  
They push him out of the room, but not before you see something that isn’t hope but isn’t fear little up his face.  
You put the folders back in order, pull your coat on and head for the door with the box. Crowbar stops you, says that’s not yours to take. Your name’s not on it, are his exact words. You explain that, actually, your name is on everything in that box. You slide out into the beginnings of a sunrise, glad to leave the police station.  
It’s cold. You put you free hand in your pocket and find something inside it. You pull out the photograph Innovator had been examining so intently.  
You put it back in your pocket and go home to check your schedule.


End file.
